History versus Physics, with Isabela Granic and Sam Biagetti

Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

I'm joined by developmental psychologist Isabela Granic and historian Sam Biagetti to discuss the differences between how reasoning is used in experimental sciences versus historical sciences. How do we get certainty from physics experiments? How do we get certainty about what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? What do "nomothetic" and "idiographic" mean?

We continue on from the discussion in Causality and Conditionality. We also make reference to an earlier discussion ("There's only two disciplines: history and physics") I had with Sam on this podcast.

We rely on two papers by Carol Cleland:

• The long one: "Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science and Experimental Science" (2002): PDF.
• The short one: "Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method" (2001): PDF.